Question:
What were some specific trust- building strategies or activities that you used when either race, ethnicity, gender, or CRS affiliation was an issue?

Answer:
I would find someone from whatever the community it might be and in this particular situation it was in the black and the white community. I knew that if I would involve the community in this process it would be helpful to have people within the community who knew me, to introduce me to people and become a bridge and to be a patron of what was happening. And in that particular case there was a prominent State Legislator that I had known for many years and he was well loved in the community and became my bridge into that community. There were parts of the community that I needed to have some access to. It was also true on the other side that we were going to want the business community leaders in particular cities to be committed because in this particular city nothing happened unless a "blue book business" leader was being alarmed. So again, it was through someone I had met in the city, in another case, that became the bridge into that organization where I could go over there and speak and talk about what I was trying to do. I could win their support that if we could reach an agreement it was going to be something the business community was going to support.

Question:
In this particular case, this wasn't a community that you lived in. How did you cultivate those networks of people that you could call?

Answer:
I had other cases in this community before so I knew individuals here and there, and that's one of the real things. In that case it was a blessing because so many times you may go into a city and you have no context at all. That really makes it even more difficult.

Question:
In those instances where you don't have any networks or any people to intervene for you how do you build networks, or find them? How do you identify the resources?

Question:
And what were you asking?

Answer:
We were trying to get a fix on the place. We wanted to know why were they still in lock up. The guards were saying tensions were too high, that it was too dangerous to end the lock up. But that was not our perception when we talked to the residents. When we met with the American Indian group, as I said, they were mostly well behaved within the institution. They avoided overtures, they said, from the Black Brotherhood Development and Cultural Organization (BBDCO), to partner with them. They wanted to be left alone.

Question:
The BBDCO was another organization within the prison?

Answer:
That’s the black group. This is the American Indian group. And they were just concerned that their people be taken care of and they wanted no part of the violence. There were half a dozen, 5 or 6 Hispanic inmates, Mexican American, and they too, would align with the American Indians. They didn’t want any part of any violence.

Question:
And, in fact, hadn’t been part of it earlier?

Answer:
Probably not. I don’t remember, but probably not. There were only a few and they stayed to themselves. There was a segment of the white population that was overtly racist and would attack the blacks. The blacks were quick to respond. Keep in mind, virtually everybody in that place was there for a crime of serious violence. Murder or serious assault. Otherwise you could get out and work a community program.

Question:
And these were teenagers, I gather?

Answer:
Up into their early 20's

Question:
So after you talked to them all what did you decide to do?

Answer:
Well, then we had to sit down and see what we could come up with. It was difficult to get in to see the black inmates. They were a Muslim group. I was the "white devil", (which they later called me in their newsletter) who could not be trusted. They verbally abused me. You know, you expect some of that. The BBDCO said "we can’t end the lock up," and it became apparent to us that they were using the lock up, as leverage against the institution. Nobody in the reformatory wanted to be in lock up, but the BBDCO was using it politically. Creating a scare by saying it wasn’t safe. It wasn’t clear why they did this, but perhaps it gave them some power. As I walked out of the room I remember a BBDCO leader pounding on the table and waving his fist at me and saying, "there ain’t going to be no mediation in this place and if there is, it’s going to be in front of television cameras.” So that told me that the only question we had to resolve ultimately would be the openness of mediation to the press. I had the good fortune some weeks earlier to meet a women named Gwen Davis who ran the Antioch Minneapolis Communiversity, an affiliate of my alma mater, Antioch college in Yellow Springs, Ohio. We coincidentally met on an airplane. I remembered that she had told me that her husband, Syl, worked with prisoners. I called Syl from St. Cloud, told him what I was doing there and he came out to the institution with Raymond Johnson, an ex-offender, who regularly worked with the BBDCO.

Question:
And were they black?

Question:
You talked off and on about bringing in resources that CRS knew about and also community resources. How did you identify resources that you weren’t previously aware of? Community resources for instance.

Question:
Did you provide technical assistance to both sides?

Answer:
Yes. I always provide technical assistance to both sides. Now sometimes, the technical assistance required by an establishment side, just for the purpose of kind of grouping them, they require less assistance than the minority community. But I make sure that I offer pre-mediation training and preparation to everybody who's going to be involved. In this case, there was actually relatively little preparation for each. Partly because of the immediacy. I think some people thought they were just coming to a meeting. But I made sure that we kind of put it into a mediation session rather than a free-for-all conversation, because it was the only way to accomplish what we needed to and, well, I'm a mediator, and that's what I do. But I really thought in this particular setting -- we must have had at least thirty people in the room that we needed mediation. We had many response agencies maybe about twenty people, and six, maybe eight Korean representatives. So we had to have some kind of a structured process so this discussion could actually take place. Part of what came out of that is that, after all the broad issues were addressed, was there were then sort of splinter mediations, if you will, or splinter meetings. And the one that comes particularly to mind was with the Small Business Administration. Besides FEMA, SBA ended up being one of the major sources for financial assistance. They had an excellent director there on-site who really bent over backwards to understand and meet the needs and be flexible. He was one of the least bureaucratic bureaucrats. So that made a big difference. They helped out with business loans, because it was mostly businesses that were destroyed during that time. We helped facilitate the Koreans applications, helping them to apply by giving them technical assistance to make the application process easier.

Question:
So the negotiations were basically over what kind of assistance was going to be provided and how and when?

Question:
Do you get these people from Denver or do you try to get them from the local community?

Answer:
Oh, we get these people from across the world. In other words, we did have the resources enough to get people from everywhere. If we wanted somebody from a university, we got somebody who used to be with CRS. We've got two people. We've got the former national director, the first director of CRS in a university. One year I brought him in and he met with a group of historians and everybody else. He's in the history department of George Mason University. Brought him in. A friend of mine from George Washington University. Brought him in a thousand times in education. When we started doing the Denver bussing plan, we had all kinds of experts coming in. So many people that you can't even begin to count, I can't even remember half the guys we've brought in as consultants about some issue. You stretch around the world to find an expert when needed.

Question:
Did you ever allow the parties to bring in people they considered consultants, did you accept who they referred to you?

Question:
What do you do there?

Answer:
What we've done there is again balance the playing field. Ground Zero is about seven blocks from our office and most of the attention around Ground Zero went to the communities of Battery Park City and Tribeca, which are on the west side of Manhattan. Equally distant from Ground Zero was China Town and the Lower East Side. A large degree of media and political attention tended to be focused on the more affluent communities immediately surrounding Ground Zero. Immediately adjacent to it were lower income populations, mostly jurisdictional populations for CRS: differences in race, color and national origin. So CRS -- our usual relationship is to work with FEMA because we had a responsibility to helping create the community relations function in FEMA and participate in training of that function may years back -- traditionally works along with FEMA to be more of its advanced arm in particular issues that they should be taking a look at, particular problems that they are going to face in outreach, giving them a better assessment of the communities that they are going to outreach to and what they are going to encounter. We immediately found language and cultural issues for their telephone lines and registration at their 800 lines. We had to help FEMA address those because the only languages you were getting were English and Spanish. Also, they needed to have their fliers and other materials translated into Chinese. We assisted them to determine what other languages they would need for their flyers so people could get in touch and register. We also helped them identify translators because they didn't have the staff available when they set up their disaster resistance recovery center. We did the outreach through our existing network of organizations and community groups to help them identity translators to both work with the community relations outreach team and in human services at the disaster recovery resistance center. Then we moved them to consider subcontracting this effort with some local umbrella groups so they had the temporary staff needed to work with the populations they were going to be facing. These two communities represented special challenges to FEMA, given its usual composition and because of linguistic and economic issues. In addition to assisting FEMA in these ways, we helped them to think through how their staff deployment. FEMA's initial concern was pretty much at the rescue effort, as it should have been, but we noticed that a large number of the people who were impacted by this disaster were wage earners who were in occupations that were ancillary to or support of what happened in the financial district. So while the primary attention was placed on getting Wall Street up and running, there were a large number of displaced wage earners living in the outer boroughs who used to work in and around the Trade Center. We needed to help them connect with our federal partners to work that through. We began to reach out to the borough presidents and the community boards in the areas immediately adjacent to Ground Zero, both in Brooklyn and Manhattan and then reaching out as far as the borough presidents in the Bronx and Queens and their community boards, so that we could get a better handle on how much displacement of workers had taken place and what level of disaster relief was necessary in those areas. After our initial outreach, FEMA came along with us, to present its programs to them so that the borough president's office would have a better sense of what was available. We had been working pretty much with the city administration and the state office of emergency management, but we needed to move it into the boroughs because we saw clearly that there would be widespread and potentially disparate impact, in terms of access to service or service delivery. This was because of the attention being placed on large businesses, primarily financial. The need for attention to be paid to wage earners who were affected -- non professionals who provided a tremendous amount of work between clean-up, food services, deliveries, etc. of all kinds to that financial district -- was critical for us. We saw it as important and so did the borough presidents' offices. In fact, they and their community outreach people were so concerned that they asked for additional sessions with us because they are looking at expanding the number of FEMA disaster recovery resistance centers. There is only one place in lower Manhattan with long lines.

Question:
Like the ones we saw outside the federal building?

Answer:
Yes. There are along the lines on the other street around the corner. Some of the boroughs and the community boards are looking at how do we get these into each of the boroughs for a short period of time. Then if they aren't necessary we can get rid of them. We can get to the people more directly affected much more easily. They've asked to meet with us and so have some of the clergy groups that we had met with earlier, to see about working together with FEMA to get the services more decentralized.

Question:
Has CRS done this kind of work with FEMA before or is this something new?

Answer:
We've worked with some of the natural disasters before, but working through this kind of national disaster and in this particular way, I don't think so. FEMA has a community relations unit that does outreach work to let people know how to get in touch, but it doesn't do the conciliation or conflict resolution work that is occurring as special challenges are met. That's where CRS has been very helpful to FEMA, working along with them. It has always been CRS jurisdiction to work in partnership with FEMA. And then we go beyond FEMA's work because we have community tension that is showing up. To us, as we looked at how we did here with our limited resources -- and we brought in some teams from outside out region -- since day three of FEMA's operation we were located at their site. We've been able to work through all the issues I identified earlier and continue to help them work them through. Then we were able to quickly identify other problems, like the lack of phone service in China Town at a time when you had call in to get to be a part of FEMA to get your number identification. Well, if there were no phones in China Town you couldn't even get on the phone. And once you got in there was the language problem, which I mentioned earlier. So, we've been assisting FEMA to work through all those kinds of things and to anticipate them in the future. Also, the way in which the police barricades were located for the purpose of the rescue and the recovery were adversely impacting China Town. The merchants were experiencing a 70% business loss -- 95% of the businesses -- so everybody who was marginal was gone as were a lot of others who were on the edge. So we were able to work along with NYPD in Manhattan South and also their emergency command center to allow some access for vehicles for food distribution businesses and others during certain hours of the day. That's something CRS can do, but FEMA cannot. It's just not part of their mission. We were able to work with merchants and business men and leadership locally to at least alleviate some of their early concerns. We are continuing to work it through because some of the business leadership from China Town has asked for an additional town meeting with the SBA (Small Business Administration) and FEMA where they would bring in their merchants,' lawyers' and insurance associations to talk directly with FEMA representatives even though FEMA has had a site set up in China Town since the second or third week. This is a larger scale interest for them to speak more directly with a broad array of leadership than the ones around FEMA services. CRS has been asked to facilitate that. So that's an additional role that is beyond what FEMA would usually do, but it's clearly jurisdictional for us and allows us to build our jurisdictional work around these sets of community concerns back to FEMA for service delivery. For the foreseeable future our work is around the road to recovery and the encouraging community stability.I think the last area about the WTC and where we are right now is the attention that CRS has had to pay to the impact on displaced workers. There are a large number of them who are in the immigrant community or have immigration status questions. We work with everyone regardless of their status, but immigration status is not a trigger for CRS. Our jurisdiction is race, color and national origin. What has happened in the WTC disaster is that individuals, between language difficulty and immigration questions, even if they are legally here, have not always been able to get what they need from FEMA. So, from very early on we worked with the New York Community Trust and the United Way of New York which had already set up the September 11 Fund. They had determined they were going to use Safe Horizons, a community agency we had met with, to provide relief services regardless of immigration status. That was an important entree for people across the board, particularly in the lower income areas in New York, and those who might have immigration status questions, to actually be able to get some relief. Also, the Department of Justice victims' assistance money flows through the State Crimes Victims Assistance Board. We were able to work with them and the New York State Crimes Victims Assistance Board and Safe Horizons so that people in this immigrant community would feel more comfortable coming forward to look for services or assistance for the recovery. That continues to be something we pay attention to. The boroughs, surprisingly enough, are particularly interested in that question as well. It is something that wouldn't hit at the city-wide level or state officials, although the Attorney General for New York State has already said once you are here you are eligible for service, that immigration status questions are something for INS to deal with, not for local determination. Working within that framework and within CRS's framework, what we noticed is that there was a large degree of tension in the advocacy community around relief and recovery services for these communities. We've been working with the advocacy community and the immigration groups around those questions with Safe Horizons and the State Crime Victims Assistance Board. Those activities have also been supported by the Catholic the Lutheran churches. The services have been located at Pier 94. There has been some interest -- because of security concerns about getting into Pier 94 -- of also getting that service decentralized. So between the requests we've been receiving from the community boards and the borough presidents' offices and the concerns from the advocacy community and the immigration community -- both people with legal status and those without legal status -- and our work with the State Crimes Victims Assistance Board and Safe Horizons, CRS is in the position to try to facilitate the communication so that service delivery can get to the points of impact where they are most needed. I think nobody else has been in a position to do that and deal with all the cross level of concerns that are raised with a multitude of issues ranging from language to immigration status. We've been able to get agreements from INS because it is not undertaking raids or indicating any additional concerns around status questions for those who have an inquiry because they were effected by the disaster. They're able to process those inquiries without triggering the enforcement arm at the IRS district office. We have been able to develop those relationships pretty well here. I don't know how the rest of the country is doing, but we were able to get that determination. Then also, to get the INS Commissioner to make statements of clarifications so that the INS in general, from the policy level in its law enforcement would be more responsive in a compassionate way to the recovery and relief efforts, rather then to penalize people whose status may have been affected by the loss of a loved one.So, CRS has been able to coordinate and facilitate an enormous amount of communication related to the recovery effort, particularly for specialized populations like this. I don't think that any other agency would have been able to do that. We were fortunate to both be able to have the insight to see it as something that needed to be done, and then have the staff capability to be able to effectuate it.There is one other component to this. We worked through channels to make INS as well as the State Department and the Attorney General's office aware that there were some people whose status may have been undocumented whose loved ones perished in the disaster. The numbers range into the 400-plus that are known so far to various community-based organizations. Their loved ones and their countries of origin are unable to claim whatever remains may be here or even the symbolic urns that Mayor Guilianni is making available with some of the debris from the World Trade Center site. They haven't been able to get to the consulates to get the visas to come to this country to be able to deal with recovering the remains, or whatever symbolic remains there are of their loved one. We were able to raise that through channels and highlight that as a focus question to provide the advisories to the Attorney General, the INS and the state. Then we were in attendance when the Mexican and Central American consulates were making outreach presentations, through community organizations, on how to access the visas for this purpose. They are not able to do very much at this time; the borders are closed because of the war effort. It's difficult, but we've at least provided the advisories and we also clarified the ability to apply for advanced parole provisions with INS for people to come into the country. We at least clarified that for local groups. Other than the advisories and providing that information and being in attendance with sets of national departments and international consulates, we've at least crystallized the problem that people are facing. That is as far as our jurisdiction will take us.

Question:
Since September 11, have you, not withstanding the good relations and the receptivity to CRS, had any conflicts with other agencies, organizations or key individuals where you had to begin applying some of your conflict management techniques?

Answer:
Let me answer you with this. In 1981, it was virtually all mediation, fishing rights issues and other Indian relation issues. But one day in November of 1981, I received a phone call from the NAACP president in Spokane, and she said, "There's a picture in today's newspaper of a big cross being burned with a bunch of men in uniforms and hoods all around the cross. It says it's the Old Hinge Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. It says, Aryan Nations. What's that?" I said, "Aryan what?" And I didn't know. So I go over and meet with her, and then I realize that I'm going to Coeur d'Alene to meet the undersheriff for the first time. He's looking for somebody like me, and I was looking for somebody like him. We worked very closely together. After a number of contacts, I realized that there needed to be an entity to countervail the influence of the Aryan Nations. They weren't interested in sitting down with a Jewish person, or a black person, or anything like that. But I began the process of identification, and I realized that the Spokane area had a minority community that was concerned about these activities. And the Jewish community was concerned about these activities. But there was no minority community, to speak of, in Coeur d'Alene, or in Northern Idaho. And so whatever was worked out would need to be worked out on the joint basis for both geographies. So I pulled together NAACP representatives from Spokane, and the one Jewish Rabbi serving that whole area, as well as the representative from the school superintendent's office, the prosecuting attorney, the US attorney, the police chief, and the sheriff of Spokane County. Also, we had the Methodist district superintendent and businessmen and the secretary of the bar association. And on the other side, that undersheriff in Northern Idaho, and the representatives from the police departments over there. There was one Jewish resident, but I couldn't find a black person at that point who lived in Coeur d'Alene. I found out later that there were several, but I couldn't find them. Oh, and the state's Human Rights Commission had an office there, so that director joined us and a United Church of Christ minister over in Coeur d'Alene. And we pulled them together, after a lot of discussion, I was the common link between all of them. They didn't know each other, even in Spokane. I was the convener. It was important that we stay together long enough to formulate a program and for me to get out of that role as quickly as possible. Because if anything's going to evolve here, the last thing that should be done is that this group was formed by the US Department of Justice on one hand, and secondly, somebody from Seattle. Those are the bad people. I mean, Seattle is in competition with Spokane. Seattleites don't understand people east of the mountains. But, in essence, what we did was form an ad-hoc organization, sponsor the first conference on hate groups and hate activity in the Northwest. TAPE CHANGE; QUESTION UNKNOWN

Answer:
Not directly. I had contact with Reverend Butler, the head of it. But he really wasn't interested in dealing with me in anyway over that. And that was it. And I don't think that there would be anybody in these organizations that would have any interest in meeting with him either. There was a two day seminar, it was statewide, Northern Idaho with the state of Washington. And at the end of my plan, we had already drawn up a constitution, by-laws for the Interstate Task Force on Human Rights. And that conference gave it legitimacy and we went from there to do a number of things in supporting each other in both areas.

Question:
So I gather you did a lot more of this sort of thing afterwards.

Answer:
Yeah, out of that model came the Interstate Task Force on Human rights that we eventually formed. Hate group activity began to manifest itself, cross-burning incidents, harassment, and organized activity, and this was before skinheads surfaced. We had Klan activity and Aryan activity and your Christian patriots and various assorted organizations that had not been present before, or known to be present. We became aware of the territorial imperative of these groups, they were organizing to form a state within a state. The Northwest Aryan Empire.

Question:
So what did these groups do to try to counter that?

Answer:
Well, every year, the World Aryan Congress met at Coeur d'Alene, out at Aryan Headquarters, seven miles North of Coeur d'Alene. You had up to three or four hundred people coming there. The Kootenai County Task Force on Human Rights, broke off from the Interstate Task Force, so you had two different groups, after a couple of years. They formed Human Rights Observances in the City Park downtown, with several thousand people in attendance, and greetings from the governors of Oregon and Washington. That was my job, to generate these. It was to say, the media was coming to cover the Aryans, that was news. So this was to say, in effect, that there are other people besides them, and we stand for human rights, fairness, and say yes to equity, and so on. But they took on a lot of different projects and programs. Then there were incidents in Coeur d'Alene, Pocatello, Boise, Portland, Seattle, and it was just cropping up all over the place. I pulled together about fourteen people from over in Spokane to sit down and consult together, these would be the NAACP regional president, Human Rights Commission Representative, and LULAC, and so on. But after we had this initial meeting, we then decided there was a need for more input. So we held a series of consultations over a year. First in Spokane, and then in Seattle, then in Portland, then in Coeur d'Alene, and then at the end of a year, formed the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment. And that has now expanded to include Colorado. Surely you know this, or do you?

Question:
I don't.

Answer:
Oh. Well it's ten years old now, the Northwest Coalition. But it has representatives from the Governors' offices from each of the five original states that we had involved, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. It's a mix of officials and community leadership. The NAACP regional offices, and somebody from an Urban League, Latino organizations, one representative from a police organization in each state, a representative of the Governor's office in each state, a Human Rights Commission representative from each state, general local coalition organizational representatives from each state. This is on the Board of Directors. And we've held a full-time staff of five people. A foundation support of 265 organizations of different kinds, ranging from the police department to state departments of education, and Diocese. The local Methodist Church on Mercer Island, was the first church. That's where I lived. The annual Methodist conference, and even the Northwest Kite-Flyers organization. You don't have to be a civil rights organization to be concerned about these things. It is 265 organizations. But it's educational programs, conferences, and there's a big annual conference held in each of the three states annually. And then smaller conferences are supported. When an incident occurs, a team will be formed to go there and respond to the problem. I was the chair of the monitoring committee, which is the main role we had, and that was to document incidents. If we could document incidents, and show by compilation of credible data, that this number of incidents had occurred in this community. Or then over to the Northwest, so many homicides, kidnapping, all of the different forms of violence. We could persuade officials and public opinion that we have a problem. And that's what we did. We were doing bias-crime data collection on a five-state basis, way before the FBI started.

Question:
We, being CRS?

Question:
And he did this with both groups together?

Answer:
Yes. See after I cleared it with both sides, and they said yes to the officers that were coming over. So both sides met with them. And they discussed what they were going to talk about and how they're going to be helpful, and everybody agreed to it and it just went so well.

Question:
And then the officers' first meeting, what was the role of the Houston officers?

Question:
How does this come about?

Question:
Changing gears completely again, we’ve talked on and off about giving technical assistance to parties. You’ve talked quite a bit about what you would do with the minority parties, but did you bring technical assistance for the majority parties, the authority figures?

Answer:
There was less of a need, but yes, we would put them in touch with counterparts and other communities who had experienced the same things. Sometimes you would do that for your own credibility, but sometimes they would have useful advice for their colleagues. Sometimes you would provide a police chief with firearms policies from other cities, sometimes you would bring a consultant to a police department from another city’s police department. That was very popular. I mentioned that I did that at the Minnesota reformatory. I brought in a corrections commissioner from another state. Sometimes we provide training for either party. You’d work with police or you’d help people put training programs together that would bring the minority community into the training process with police.

Question:
And what about technical assistance for the minority community?

Question:
So they were there to give factual information?

Answer:
Correct, technical and factual, not to do anything else, and they didn't try to do anything else.

Question:
Were the experts from the welfare department seen as being on one side or the other?

Answer:
Most the time the parties themselves think of it in the context of our mediation because we need some of these things done or certain areas addressed. They create some approaches to it and identify resources that I wouldn't be familiar with at all. Like the one I mentioned this morning about the attorney justice professional.

Question:
So were you always receptive to those community resources that they highlighted or emphasized, or who had the final say?

Question:
When they understood how their behavior was influencing the wrong kind of population, were they willing to change?